We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a narrow base to broadly levied taxes. To test...

Horizontal inequality by ethnic group has remained remarkably persistent for wealth, education, and access to certain services in Nigeria. While significant gains in the reduction of inequality and improvement in access have been made for more locally administered services, outcomes are stickier...

While it is recognized that effective state institutions are pivotal for economic development, it is not well understood what their origins are and what explains their cross-country differences. We focus on budget institutions in developing economies, as efficient public finance planning in such...

This paper discusses the rationale and options for a fiscal anchor for South Africa and its potential for restoring and maintaining fiscal sustainability. It argues that a well designed fiscal anchor can be useful in the current fiscal milieu, but notes that the popularity of fiscal rules belies...

Budget reliability is the first pillar of Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA). In this study, we construct an expansion of the PEFA government response accuracy indicator and test its decomposition, with an application to the government budgets and state general accounts of...

This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil's state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies and institutions at all government levels,...

In this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are fragmented in India's cities between the urban...

Do intergovernmental transfers reduce revenues collected by local government authorities (LGAs)? There is already a well-established body of literature in public finance, which argues that intergovernmental grants 'crowd out' local revenues. Most existing studies, however, explore the fiscal...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal capacity in resourcerich contexts. This paper...